Blog Archives

One of the Banter crew, Williamny23, has started his own site, The Captain’s Blog.

Go check it out. He’s got some good stuff up there and he’s only just begun.

When I finished reading the Daily News this morning on my way to work, I kept busy thinking about my day, and looked at a kid sitting across from me, music bleeding out of his cheesy earphones. The 1 train was creeping, not zipping along, starting at 191st street. When the train limped  into the 157th street station I noticed a heavyset female police officer in our car and fantasized about her taking out the kid with the loud music.

Then I saw  a crowd of people on the uptown platform. When our train stopped and opened its doors, the officer spoke into her walkie-talkie and stepped off the train. I looked out of the window again and saw a young man, shirtless, sitting on the uptown platform, his legs dangling over the tracks. The crowd gave him plenty of room. An uptown train was stopped about fifty feet away from him. The man had a hard look on his face and he looked straight ahead or down, I couldn’t figure out which.

A woman next to me turned to her companion and raised her hand, indicating that the man was drunk. Maybe he was, or just stoned or maybe crazy. Most of the people in my car stood up to see what it was all about. Then, they returned to their seats, exchanged glances with a neighbor and went back to their book or the paper or thier music and texting.

Once our train left the station it started to move quickly again. I forgot about the annoying kid and his music and thought about the guy on the track.

Yanks hope to have their way with the Jays tonight in Toronto and take this series.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

More Rothko…

Christopher Walken: scene-stealer.

In fact, this scene might be the best in the entire movie, which isn’t nearly as engaging as the original BBC mini-series, but is interesting just the same:

No small thanks go to our man, Ted Berg:

Simple pleasures are the best. Brown butter and sage: a good combination:

Thanks to Technicolor Kitchen for the inspiration.

Silly, dated, but still slammin’.

And this one’s got a Mickey Mantle reference…

David Kindred has a new book about the Washington Post. It got a favorable review last weekend in the New York Times Book Review:

Kindred still lives near Washington and has maintained friendships with a number of Post reporters. He was granted permission to write this book by Leonard Downie Jr., The Post’s executive editor from 1991 to 2008, over mild objections from the corporate chairman, Donald E. Graham. (“It takes just one person saying something stupid to hurt you,” Graham tells Kindred.) Graham needn’t have worried. While pulling no punches in detailing at least one scandal involving a plan to sell access to government officials and journalists at exclusive “salons,” not to mention a notorious newsroom fistfight and the pain of “managing decline,” Kindred makes no attempt to disguise that the team he’s rooting for plays home games at 1150 15th Street NW. “Morning Miracle” may be the best semi-insider’s account we’ll get about a newspaper’s losing season of red ink, cutbacks and institutional angst amid the current industry crisis. This loser, it should be noted, won 11 Pulitzers for work done during the period Kindred is writing about, 2007 through 2009.

…Kindred is a connoisseur of journalists’ voices, exquisitely attuned to the trouble they’re in, but carrying on while they still can. Some of the best writing here is a powerful implicit argument for the irreducible value of sophisticated and fearless accountability reporting. His chronicle of how Dana Priest and Anne Hull meticulously pursue their investigation of the disgraceful treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, from the first nebulous lead to the final stages of nailing a multipart exposé, is superb. The war correspondent Anthony Shadid (now with The New York Times), the feature writer Gene Weingarten and the Post team that covered the mass shooting at Virginia Tech provide further examples of exemplary work. Kindred’s portrait of The Post’s 2008 presidential election coverage is a love song to everyone from the headline writers and the front-page designer to the Pakistani immigrant who delivers the paper at dawn in the Virginia suburbs.

Kudos to Mr. Kindred. This one sounds interesting…Here’s an excerpt.

Tim Marchman on the aging Derek Jeter.

It seems like Johnny Damon will stay with the Tigers. Up in Boston, Dan Shaughnessy doesn’t understand why.

Git it in gear, fellas. That sombitch Bautista hit a game-winning dinger and spit in yer grill last night. You gunna just take that?

We’ll be root-root-rootin’ you on…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture by Bags]

Mr. Rothko on a rainy day…

Over at the Pinstriped Bible, Jay Jaffe weighs in on Javier Vazquez being skipped a turn:

Like an injured wasp, Javier Vazquez is still able to sting once in awhile, but he’s desperately in need of being relieved of his misery with a rolled-up newspaper, or at the very least swatted to the sidelines. On Saturday, his season reached another low point, as he yielded four runs in three innings against the Mariners, the majors’ lowest-scoring team. While the Yankees nonetheless emerged with a win thanks to strong work from Chad Gaudin and a late offensive burst which produced five unanswered runs, the start marked the third straight time that Vazquez had failed to reach five innings.

Alas, this should surprise exactly no one. After Vazquez allowed 10 baserunners and six runs (three earned) in 5.1 innings during his first start of the month, manager Joe Girardi admitted that his velocity was down, while pitching coach Dave Eiland conceded, “He has a little dead arm,” which isn’t as serious as it sounds. “Dead arm” is a term for muscular fatigue, a warning sign from the body but something which will improve with rest, rather than a structural problem with ligaments or cartilage which would require intervention.

What Will Johnny Do?

Go back to Boston? Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home again, though Boston was never really Damon’s home, just the most-celebrated stop of his career. On the other hand, Damon was an army brat, so who knows? I assume he’ll end up back at the Fens when all is said and done here, though I’d be amused if he stayed with the Tigers.

Rays manager, Joe Maddon, hopes Damons stays put as well.

Bacon, lettuce and fried greenish tomato…

Why the hell not?

From Ideas in Food.

I’m not afraid to admit it, I went through a heavy Bob and Doug phase. Had both of the albums, had ’em memorized.

Yes, I was a dork:

No use in steerin, now.

As fun as dumb can be:

Dig this most excellent essay on the old New York Herald Tribune by William Zinsser (who wrote a helpful book about writing):

Much has been written about the Herald Tribune’s bright stars in those postwar years: the foreign editor Joseph Barnes, the foreign correspondent Homer Bigart, the city reporter Peter Kihss, the sports columnist Red Smith, the Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Nat Fein, the music critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Virgil Thomson, and many others. But the paper never forgot that its readers were an infinitely mixed stew of interests and curiosities, and it had experts squirreled away in various nooks to cater to their needs: the food critic Clementine Paddleford, the fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard, the stamps editor, the crossword-puzzle editor, the garden editor, the racing columnist Joe H. Palmer.

Palmer was typical of the paper’s passion for good writing, nowhere better exemplified than in the sports section. It was in those pages, as a child baseball addict, that I found my first literary influences. The Trib sportswriters were my Faulkner and my Hemingway, and now I was in the same room with those bylines-come-to-life: Rud Rennie, Jesse Abramson, Al Laney. Laney, who covered golf and tennis, never took off his hat. I often paused at the sports department to watch those Olympians, wreathed in cigarette smoke, tapping out their stories with ferocious speed—especially Abramson, who seemed to have the entire history of boxing at his fingertips.

Ruling over that domain was the sports editor, Stanley Woodward. Built like a 250-pound fullback, he was as sensitive to good writing as a 125-pound poet. No hoopsters or pucksters played in his pages, no batsmen bounced into twin killings. Woodward had recently hired two stylists to add luster to his stable. First he plucked Red Smith from the Philadelphia Record, thereby presenting to a national audience the best sportswriter of his generation. Then he imported Palmer, an English professor at a college in Kentucky, to write a column called “Views of the Turf.” I knew nothing about horses, but Palmer’s columns, a blend of erudition and wit, strewn with allusions to Shakespeare and Chaucer, took me into a picaresque new world, often straying far from “the turf.” I still remember a column extolling the virtues of Kentucky jellied bourbon.

Yanks Jays.

No frills, just banter.

Ivan Nova, the World is Yours.

[Picture by Bags]